General Discussions

Hi Celeste - we will be moving away from our general email inbox sometime in the fall term (looking to transition around fall reading week at this point if all goes well). Our one-stop shop, Service Laurier, made this transition around a year ago away from their general email inbox and instead offered a webform submission for questions (similar to what you see Bell, Rogers etc. have for questions). They maintained their online chat bot, phone lines, in person but instead of email there is now a web form students have to submit. The result was their incoming web form inquiries were drastically less than the email volume. I can't remember the percentage but it was something like 40% less. Having to take a few extra steps to fill out a form rather than fire off an email led to students taking pause and looking for answers themselves before firing off an email it seems. And it eliminated a lot of the emails that were coming to our one-stop that shouldn't have ever gone to them (i.e. parking or housing questions that are outside of their scope). Since students pick a category for what their question is about as they submit the webform it also allows for some better sorting within the webform inbox to triage questions being answered (i.e. during peak registration time, they will sort and work through "Registration" categories faster, at invoice due date time, they can sort and work through "Payment" questions or "OSAP" inquiries faster). To my knowledge there wasn't kickback from students. I think some internal departments questioned it at first but they adapted. Based on out one-stop's experience we will be going the same route for financial aid inquiries with getting rid of our email address and creating a webform for inquiries. Simple financial aid inquiries are still to go through our one-stop webform (how to apply, when will my funds be released, etc.) but we will have a separate webform for more complicated requests (i.e. restrictions, out of province, academic progress). Not sure how the dual forms will work out yet, but we were told this was the best way to handle it by the IT experts. We're hoping this will help our volumes a bit more too and will lead to students taking the time to read our website to see the answers that are already there before firing off questions. And we are looking forward to being able to triage based on categories indicated on the webform submission as well.